


(Metal) Blades of Grass

by trumpetofdoom



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Feghoot, Mad Science, Multi, North American Pronunciations, Post-Canon, actual science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-22 16:53:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22085764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trumpetofdoom/pseuds/trumpetofdoom
Summary: Most front yards are the color of chlorophyll. This one isn't, and Agatha, Gil and Tarvek jointly suspect this wasn't really intended.
Relationships: Agatha Heterodyne/Tarvek Sturmvoraus/Gilgamesh "Gil" Wulfenbach
Comments: 23
Kudos: 63
Collections: Girl Genius Spark-Exchange Yuletide 2019





	(Metal) Blades of Grass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dirigibird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirigibird/gifts).



> Written for Spark Exchange 2019, prompt "OT3 Sparking/working together".
> 
> The "North American Pronunciations" tag may require a bit of elaboration. I've always known the word "solder", as something used in metallurgy and electrical work, to be pronounced "SOD-er", with a silent L. I recognize that's not how it looks like it ought to be pronounced, and it's my understanding that in some other English-speaking countries, it's pronounced "SOLD-er", like "soldier" without the I, but "SOD-er" is what we're using here.
> 
> This will be important, I promise.

“What have we here?” murmured Agatha, Lady Heterodyne, arms crossed, flanked by her two consorts.

“It appears to be a lawn made entirely of metal,” observed Gilgamesh, Baron Wulfenbach, bending down to examine what would normally be blades of grass.

“Your observational powers continue to astound me, Wulfenbach,” said Tarvek Sturmvoraus, Prince of Sturmhalten and leading pretender to the Lightning Throne, shaking his head slowly. “How do you notice the _grass_ and fail to pick up on the _enormous tree_?”

Calling the tree _enormous_ was probably overstating things. In fact, by Spark flora standards, five meters tall was rather tame. It was, however, very obviously metallic in a way that suggested unnatural things had been done to it, and none of the three Sparks present could remember doing anything that might have been responsible for its current state.

“I must admit, I’m curious as to how this happened,” Agatha mused. “Well, this is culturally part of my town, so I could just go in and ask.”

* * *

From the look on the homeowner’s face when she answered the door, meeting the Heterodyne had not been on her to-do list for the day. But as a lifelong Mechanicsburger (even if her house was technically outside the walls and the city limits), she took it as... mostly an honor.

“It wasn’t like this before...” She glanced at Gil, sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of tea, and continued, “...well, _before_. But I’d been visiting my brother in town, and it wasn’t safe to leave, and then suddenly it was three years later and when I got back, my front yard had turned into metal. Of course, at the time it was also overgrown and I had to cut it back. And let me tell you, cutting back metal foliage is harder than it sounds.”

“I can imagine,” said Agatha, imagining it.

Tarvek looked to Gil. “You were the only one of us active for most of that time. Any ideas what might have caused this?”

Gil tilted his head to the side two or three different ways, staring into the middle distance. “I can’t think of anything the Empire would have been doing that could have been responsible,” he eventually said. “And if it were somehow a result of proximity to the time bubble, I would expect to have seen it in more locations. That’s not to say I can’t think of things it might have been, but...”

The homeowner took Agatha’s arm. “Frankly, my lady, I don’t care whose fault it was, I just want it fixed. I used to grow apples on that tree, and they’ve been inedible for five years now.”

“Of course, of course,” Agatha said, patting the homeowner’s grasping hand. “Do we have your permission to take samples of the metal so that we can see what it is and how to get rid of it?”

“You are the Heterodyne, my lady,” she said. “You don’t even have to ask.”

* * *

“Tarvek, what does the mass spectrometer have to say?” Agatha swept into the lab in which her consorts were working.

Tarvek stood up from the workbench he was stationed at. “Some things that needed further interpretation, but we think we’ve gotten it more or less figured out. Naturally, there are some impurities in the metal, but it appears to be an alloy of mostly tin and lead. I think I’m also seeing enough copper that I can’t consider it just an impurity, but it’s borderline.”

“We also discovered,” said Gil, coming around the side of the spectrometer, “that the plants hadn’t been completely turned into metal. They’ve soaked it up.”

Agatha’s eyes lit up. “Then it should be possible to somehow undo that and get the plants back to being fully organic. If we can suck out the metal — or can we get it out some other way?”

“It’s got a melting point under two hundred Centigrade,” Gil said, “so if we can melt it out without lighting the grass on fire, that might be a strategy.”

Tarvek had disappeared for a moment, but came back with drafting papers. “You’re not thinking big enough, Wulfenbach.” He shook his head. “Which is a rare problem for you of all people to have. If the plants and the apple tree have soaked up that much solder, that means it’s coming from somewhere in the soil. We’ll have to remove it not just from the plants, but from the soil as well, or it’ll just come back.”

“So what are you thinking?” Agatha was in full agreement with Tarvek that Gil rarely thought too small, but she was curious what he’d come up with.

“There’s two basic directions we could come at it from: overhead or underneath.” Tarvek was writing notes as he spoke. “Overhead has the advantage of getting to the aboveground flora more easily and probably being easier to get into position, but underneath would mean we could get at the source of the contamination more easily. Not only that, we could pull the metal back out of the plants the same way it went in.”

Agatha nodded. “I’m not sure the undercity extends out that far, but it’s a good thought. Could we do both?”

Gil shook his head. “No, they’d be working against each other. We’d be trying to pull in two different directions.” He demonstrated by interlinking his fingers and then attempting to pull his hands apart. “We’re going to have to pick one or the other.”

Agatha nodded. “If we can get under her front yard, we should do that. But what are you thinking from there?”

Tarvek produced a notebook from under the table. “We’ve still got Count Wolkerstorfer’s notes on magnetic field induction in non-ferrous metals. That should be a good starting point. Take that, combine it with what we learned from the Beast, and we ought to be able to draw it all in.”

Gil frowned. “Without hurting the plants?”

“Remember, Gil, the Beast didn’t affect organic material at all.” Agatha paused for a brief moment. “Granted, it wasn’t dealing with anything infused like this, but I’m sure we can tune the magnetic field shapers finely enough that that won’t be a problem.”

* * *

Two days later, the trio had restored the yard to its original, non-metallic state. When they looked through the mound of metal, they found most of it was in the form of dust and sludge, but they also discovered some small discs of the same alloy that had been buried in the dirt. They did some tests on the soil and discovered that in that neighborhood, thanks to some Sparkwork done by Ominox Heterodyne, it was particularly eager to take on the characteristics of whatever it contained (most commonly water or plant matter, but every now and then...).

No explanation was immediately forthcoming for what the discs were doing there, and the Heterodyne and her consorts quickly moved on to more pressing concerns.

* * *

Months later, a familiar wagon caravan was sighted near Mechanicsburg, and Agatha took Gil and Tarvek with her to meet it.

“Miss Clay,” the Circus’s leader said with a wide grin, inviting the trio into his wagon. “Always nice to catch up with former members of the troupe when the opportunity arises.”

“Herr de la Scalla,” Agatha replied, returning the smile. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since that business in England. I didn’t realize you’d taken over.”

Abner nodded. “Yeah, old Master Payne and the Countess decided to step down shortly after that. I’d already effectively been our artistic director for a while, so I was the natural choice, and Pix and I have been keeping things running since then.”

“And how’s that been going?” asked Gil.

“Wonderfully, thank you.” Abner wordlessly offered his visitors a bottle of wine, and they all nodded their acceptance. “You’ve given us quite a bit of new content, and Pix has been simply thrilled to play an outright lead role, not merely the romantic partner.”

Agatha raised an eyebrow. “I thought she’d enjoyed playing the High Priestess.”

“Oh, she did. And she still does, when we do any of the Boys shows. But Pix also plays you in our more recent material, Agatha.”

The Heterodyne and her consorts traded uncertain looks. “You have shows about us now?” Gil asked. “Should we be worried?”

“If you’d like to sit in on a rehearsal, I’m sure we could arrange something.” Pix’s voice from the doorway caused everyone to turn to see her.

“You still do Heterodyne Boys shows? Who’s your Lucrezia, then?” Tarvek asked. “It was Agatha the last time I saw you perform.”

“A girl we picked up outside of Constanța a few years ago. You’d like her, Agatha. She’s the sweetest little thing until she gets into character, but she plays Lu with touches of viciousness and cruelty that I’ve never seen anyone else bring to the character.”

“Then she’s probably on the right track,” Agatha said. “The only person I’ve ever met who had actually met my birth mother and had anything nice to say about her was the last Prince of Sturmhalten, and he was a bit obsessed.” 

Tarvek turned to Agatha. “Really, there’s no need to understate my father’s dreadfulness on my account. He cared about a woman he wasn’t even related or married to more than anybody he was.”

Abner nodded. “Vicious and cruel are historically accurate, you say? I’ll pass that along, though I do want to be clear that they’re supposed to be at least _mostly_ gone by the end of the plays.”

* * *

“Hey, Abner,” Agatha said, idly swirling her second glass of wine, “I always wondered how you ended up with the Circus. Lars told me why he joined, and I heard about Zeetha from Olga, and of course you know why I spent a few months on stage, but I never heard about you. What’s your story?”

“Me?” Abner chuckled. “I’ve been with the Circus for so long, I’d almost forgotten how I got here. Before I joined, and for a little while after, I was a counterfeiter.”

Agatha raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“It was easier to do back when a lot of places made their own coins,” Tarvek noted. “One thing the Wulfenbach Empire’s creation of the Pax-Guilder did was that it removed the need for every county, duchy and principality to have their own system. Many places still did anyway, but if they felt it was more trouble than it was really worth, they didn’t have to.”

Abner nodded. “In most places, you could still use coins from several towns over, even if the people there didn’t know what they looked like. And it was a lot easier to use fakes when they didn’t know what to look for.

“Now, any decent counterfeiter knows that the coins that get you the most money are the ones that are _worth_ the most money. But those run into the problem of being both the obvious choice if you’re going to counterfeit and also comparatively rarely used, so you can’t necessarily get as much mileage out of them. If you’re running around with nothing but fifty-mark coins, the Watch will get suspicious. So I usually went for slightly smaller denominations to stay under the radar.”

“Would you ever do the really small coins?” Agatha asked.

Abner shook his head. “Not to use. For practice, sometimes, or just to have them and look at them. Actually, I used to have a box of pfennige I’d done, but I lost it on a visit to Mechanicsburg about ten years ago.”

“Herr de la Scalla,” Tarvek said, “you would normally use base metals for this kind of thing, right?”

“Naturally.” Abner looked slightly insulted that this would even need to be asked. “Things like tin or lead are much easier to get than gold and silver.”

The Sparks exchanged glances.

“Do you two remember the metal-infused tree from a few months back?” Agatha asked.

Gil slapped his forehead. “Of course. It’s all perfectly clear to me now.

“Ab’s cents made the yard go solder.”


End file.
